Wednesday, September 30, 2009

john curry, certainly a world class poet living in our community, is presently facing almost certain eviction.

Stephen Brockwell alerted me of this precarious situation, by phone, and asked if I would get the word out, most recently at the TREE Reading Series on September 22, where we were able to scare up enough to cover one of his 5 months’ owed rent & save his telephone service.

curry’s been in constant production of his own and hundreds of others’ work since 1979. he’s mainly ineligible for grants. His bookstore is mainly an unused resource. His archive documenting the growth of avant-garde writing in Canada is one of the key collections in the country. Nicky Drumbolis has said: “curry and his work are the best-kept secret in Canada.”

Since time is of the essence, if curry’s to avoid eviction, there are a few ways you can help:

Room 302 Books is the only bookstore in Canada ever to focus specifically on the avant-garde and “overlooked outsiders,” specializing in concrete/visual/sound poetries (mainly Canadian) with a stock of over 20,000 mainly rare titles, including “elusive ephemera,” and probably the only source of most of jwcurry’s various imprints and titles (which number in the thousands). curry’s current lists finally focus on his own work as artist & publisher, virtually the first time everything that’s (still) available has been made commonly available. You can purchase bookstore IOUs (or set up an account) today in any amount for those who’d like to do that.

Subscribe to Curvd H&z, curry’s serial imprint. “donor” subscriptions (please indicate) of $100 or more get ½ the stash in a sampling of available titles from various of his imprints immediately, the remaining ½ put on account for forthcoming titles.

Donate outright.

I would like to encourage you to donate something so as to keep this excellent bookstore, publisher, archive and artist alive, and at the same time help prevent curry’s eviction from his apartment. For those who’d like to purchase bookstore IOU’s, I’d ask you to write (#302-880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa Canada K1R 6R7) or call him at (613) 233 0417. Please contribute as you can.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Please remember what Susan Sontag said: be careful talking about meaning in literature. It’s always one step away from sociology, the lowest form of measurement.-- Barry Callaghan, as quoted in Walrus (October 2009)

Answering the phone is like having yourticket torn. Having your ticket torn is adramatic act of entrance. Inside thetelephone is a tiny talker, a husbandwho is not able to be desired and whodoes not desire his wife though she isable. The wife needs to be pressed uponas she dies. The husband needs to stayin Antarctica doing work that willbenefit many. Actors and actresses aredesirable because they are needless.They are commonly up on screens thatdon’t touch. (from “(three)”)

Writing ten extensions/sections, what makes this poem is how she doesn’t hold herself to spacing or structure, weaving and blending from section to section, a wandering decalogue of extravagant voices. Who is this Lesley Yalen?

This kitchen person spares some change for the street people who squat beside the health food store.

The street people dumpster-dive to supplement memory.

Pass and be passed, spare and be spared.

This kitchen person is sporadic, sometimes carrying so many shopping bags, sometimes concentrating on sidewalk cracks.

Sometimes she starts a conversation but skips out quick.

Other times she just clicks on by.

The specialist tells her he is not going to lie down when he discovers her cells aredividing unchecked.

But where are all these small moments going, heading? Poems of breath and halting thought, pushing ahead by going thoughtfully slow. I am intrigued by the poems of this Lily Brown, and am intrigued as to what she might do with a full collection.

At nightone wantswhat everyoneelse has. At dawnthousands oflegs will scissortogether and apartand a couplewill be crushedby a harriedambulance.It will not besad, true or false. (Mark Yakich)

Girl aged eight years

Old enough to swallow herselfgirls seem to be pronewith heads downward. Attentiontransfixes across the lumenher obligations. Chores.Like on Little Houseon the Prairie Sundaysno work as possibleas folded stillness.Staring. Aged. Enough.Cure. Inhale one everyyear for the rest of yourlife. See how you’ve grown. (Kate Schapira)

Monday, September 28, 2009

Chris Ewart is currently completing a PhD in English at Simon Fraser University and working on a second novel. His first novel, Miss Lamp, was shortlisted for a 2007 ReLitAward and is one of the Top 30 Books of 2006 as chosen by Pages on Kensington in Calgary. He has taught at the University of Calgary and the Alberta College of Art and Design. His critical and creative work (fiction, plays, poetry) often interrogates disability and normalcy in narrative and popular culture.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Miss Lamplets me call myself an author. A friend taught it a while ago and gave me some anonymous student essays about it. I’ve kept those papers. Even a few years on, the actual of “book” seems surreal – a ripening representation of and detachment from myself. In some ways Miss Lampallows me to question my writing less while giving me more narrative room to explore the possible with storytelling. I like to have fun with the ways words exploit our senses (and sensibilities) and with how situations play out when characters surprise us, make us scratch our heads, laugh a little, or even mist up. My new work follows a girl who wears a dress made of living flowers. In the course of her travels, she enters a town where much of what one may associate with a sunny day (picnics, music, ice cream, kites, etc.) is forbidden. Colours do peek through the greyscale of clouds and placards there, but Miss Lampis more Technicolor throughout.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

I didn’t. Well, unless I count grade school. I’ve always enjoyed telling stories – from rotten apples to traffic lights – and narrative often hinges upon my poems too. I wrote some crappy “burnt orange sunset” poetry early on and a few travel narrative things as well. It wasn’t until my later 20s that I realized I could take this banal poetry and burnish it into an elevation of the mundane!

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I take a while to write drafts, I think. I often write skeletal bits (a sticky phrase, a brief scene or some dialogue, etc.) and then in subsequent edits I decide whether to remove or add meat to those bits and where to spend time chewing. Ideas don’t take long to arrive – whether from a news headline that day or a memory I want to characterize, or fit within a chapter – but where they might go (and why, within the story’s logic) takes time. Sometimes writing towards an event or a situation characters/places find themselves in becomes the story itself, but lots of scribbles and moments from first drafts do make it through to the letting go.

4 - Where does a piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Often, my fiction moves in near sustainable vignette-style chunks. In other words, chapters satisfy their own internal narrative(s). As small chapters add up, characters and events start to collide. This interconnectivity becomes a book for me. What I write (and read) in other genres – a character or voice or image from a poem or a short story – can overlap and become significant to larger narratives. Delano from Miss Lampworks like that. He is from a poem. Before that he was an irksome character from a Melville short story. I guess his “fiction” began when I asked “what can I do with this guy?”

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I like readings a lot. They usually provide forgiving places to try new work and to find what works best for fresh and not so fresh stuff. I can also get a good sense of a piece’s pacing and how it “reads” through a reading. There are a lot of sentences full of marbles out there.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I want to show much in few words. I believe in concise use of language. I want to visit characters who exhibit uniqueness under everyday conditions. How do I challenge notions of bodily and behavioural normalcy? Are we represented by our quirks, subtle (or not so subtle) differences or by the stuff we wear, say and identify with? I also enjoy elevating the seemingly mundane through characters who occupy (and are sometimes named by) their jobs. Before moving on, I like to extract the possible sense (and sensory) from words – in all their pauses, clanks, flashes and rushes. I don’t believe fiction and poetry are so far apart.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Writing should offer an escape – a less invasive, more imaginative perspective – from the barrage of too-often-bad-news or useless news or hyper-contemporary, saleable noise in mediums of information delivery. If my writing puts readers into places where they can find some shine in the humdrum of life or stop to take in a line to reframe or consider ideas in a new way, that’s good. How characters deal with tension and what narrative(s) zoom in upon will arguably imbue commentary and from time to time create allegories out of font. Writers need to put enough hearty shit, rain and sunlight down so that readers can pluck a flower or a weed along the way – a grass whistle or two beside the smokestacks.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I think editors are great and I think great editors are even better. Working with an editor makes me eager to anticipate what gets caught and reeled in or cut and thrown back. An editor’s slight remove from the immediate of the text often brings a welcome objectivity – a thimble for the needle.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Narratives often work against their own declarations.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

It can be difficult to write creatively when so much of our time is devoted to different labours and loves. When I can get more or less freer-thought-space – sometimes early morning, sometimes late at night or a block of a couple days – I write to a quota (a page or three) during each period (or I revise earlier sections).

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I go to a different page of the draft to see if there is something to hook onto or continue from – maybe in a different direction. Failing that, I go through notes and other sources I’ve stored up. Sometimes music greater than 72 beats per-minute can loosen the jam. Going for a bike ride can help too.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music, I think, mostly. It’s prevalent in my writing. From a drunken flute quartet serenading an apple orchard to characters who miss tuning pianos or who hum fiery, tasty musical scales. There’s always a marching band in there somewhere. My dad is a big fan of that southern California marching band sound (I was born down there). The Beatles’ “Got to Get You into My Life” jumps to mind, Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” and the horns of Blood, Sweat and Tears via aural osmosis. Oscar Peterson’s Canadiana Suitemotivates me these days. Visual art in a visually-biased culture is also important. I’m writing a lot about billboards lately.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I’m lucky to have a group of friends who write and write about writing and talk about writing to people on the radio and teach writing. We share, critique and at times collaborate. I also have supportive teachers, supervisors and editors. Writing becomes important for me when it defies my expectations or turns those expectations sideways. Beckett always baffles me.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d like to convince someone to put on my one act play. My honeymoon will also be fun.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I enjoy teaching and writing for different audiences. If that wasn’t so, I might have been a semi-rock-star-turned-furniture-mover or perhaps a secret travel agent. I still play guitar a bit. Music still itches me. Maybe I’d be a dishwasher-sommelier. I enjoy cooking and food enters my stories quite a bit. I’d probably run a sandwich shop as I write about sandwiches often. At the very least I’d brave most types of weather to wear a sandwich-board proclaiming

PASTRAMI ON RYE

PILED SKY HIGH

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I played and studied music pretty seriously and travelled with it for a few years. I think writing provides a compatible extension of practice – of getting my thoughts down – but I get to keep the same address and phone number now.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I’ve always liked the hunch and brainstorm of beginning, I like to be open to various styles, and that hasn’t changed, but maybe the transitions from the way of thinking in one poem to the next are more open or fluid, the poems themselves less self-contained than when I started writing.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

My uncle Victor is a great story-teller with an infectious laugh; my uncle Peter had a deep voice and a Norwegian accent, he and my grandpa spoke several languages and talked about Kafka; my grandmothers worried and whispered about religion and what trouble somebody’d got themselves in – as a kid I loved to listen to it all, much of it misunderstood or unheard – around the corner, picking at the weave of cloth on the arm of a chair or mentally tracing the lines of the doorway.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I don’t know how long it takes, a long time I guess. All the stages feel good – aimless, wondering, reading, note-taking, composing – sometimes they overlap, sometimes a single word feels urgent. Most of the poems or sequences in Lean-to are several pages long – it was a pleasure to be inside the pieces for a long time, I felt completely engrossed.

I like to open a new book of poems in a bookshop to see how the poet’s thoughts are shaped, where that might take me. I don’t think about form too much when I get started, but try to be alive to shapes suggested by the raw thoughts. Drafts of “South Shore” came out of journal entries, so the final shape is similar to early notes. The “August” poems are more crafted – they needed a taut line, but my notes were all over the place. While writing “Sidhe of the city”, I was concerned about how the world is affected underneath by what happens at the surface, and I was more deliberate in thinking from page bottom (as bedrock) up.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Bits and pieces at the beginning; there might be a glimmer of “book” which I have to let go…

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Sometimes the transition from private writing space to a public venue is difficult – I feel grateful to other poets who go about the business of publishing their work so people can read it. I heard Don Domanski read like it was an intimate conversation in a room full of acquaintances – and Phil Hall alters me every time I hear him.

Reading aloud in public is a good way to re-enter the writing. I worked with the cellist Norman Adams on a performance of the “August” suite of poems, and it was fantastic to develop a kind of ‘conversation’ between two – instruments? disciplines? – two people with sometimes similar responses to the poems, sometimes in argument or discord about what had happened or what was ‘said’.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I don’t have a design. I try to go where I feel afraid to go. I had been thinking of “wife” for example, since I am one – it’s an old word, it’s dirty and eschewed, it has a long history of implications: domestic and sexy. It’s a charged kind of word that makes people angry, so I guess it’s current, dangerous territory; the required bond demands an internal turbulence, a wilderness, and I wanted to go further in there.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

‘Verse’ comes from Latin versus a furrow, and vertere to turn: a digging in, and preparing for new growth. I think we’re all starting to wake to a damaged earth, the world is alive with mistakes.

Everyone has a part in this. Observing and recording the natural world is a vital undertaking, as is a poetry which speaks directly to environmental and social concerns. And there are subtle ways the larger culture is fundamentally shaped or expressed by verse too: in song, howl, patterns. The return to traditional forms (sonnets, haiku, ghazals, Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf) and revival of dying languages (Robert Bringhurst’s translations of Skaay and Ghandl for example) shows a respect for an earlier way of life, forms that once fit our mental paths, and it’s a thrill to find that they still do. There is also a need for innovation, to experiment, to follow strange routes of thought, or thought-paths we tread every day but seldom pay attention when we’re there. Socially and scientifically, the language itself is changed, charged, deconstructed, reconstructed. Culture is endlessly generative, by its nature a process of growth which includes the origin of our relationships with one another, with language, with the earth and air, and in ongoing variations.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult oressential (or both)?

I try not to be too bull-headed…

Lean-tois full of repetitions and returns, can (I think) be read as one long poem, and when I was close to the end, I needed someone who hadn’t read it in bits and pieces, who could give me a fresh sense of the whole. Hearing Kate Kennedy’s response at Gaspereau Press was an extremely helpful gauge – a well-placed hmm from her made all the difference (Oh, I said)...

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“Gainsay who dare” is the battle cry of the McDonalds and Curries.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t have much time – my kids are small, it’s been about 12 years of no time to read or write or think or sleep. Our youngest is three, so still a couple years left in this routine. I work on weekends and when James takes holidays – we throw our tenting gear in the car and set up camp in a different place each time, James takes the boys out on explores. I used to work at the picnic table or in the tent, but now I have a card table so I don’t have to pack papers and dictionary away when the beans come out.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I like reading English written as a second language, and translations. I'm reading some Ted Hughes translations – his commentary and letters to poets are wonderful, as are the poems which he altered less and less from original 'inter-linear cribs' – the “oddities”, the strange arrangements of thought in foreign grammar left increasingly intact. He hurts and buoys me with this in equal measure.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I was invited to participate in a ‘continuum’ of artists whose work was shown at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, and it was good to think of the poem as visual art; the result (“Hurtling”) was influenced by almost all of the above. One of the pieces I was shown was a weaving by Kaija Harris – an abstract ‘map’ of Saskatchewan. I’m from Saskatchewan and had returned from a fraught visit home, was charged by the recent trip and again by the gorgeous weaving. I was thinking of the twist of Harris’s weave, I was thinking of family bonds and the structure of DNA, I was thinking of the bonds in the chemical skeleton for common herbicides; I had a broken storm window with six panes – these considerations suggested a larger ‘form’. The ‘double-helix’ lines had to follow or overlap cracks in the panes. For the first time I moved my work off the page and on to a larger space of wall – it felt strange and great. The poem was printed on overhead transparencies on the glass windows; hung and lit, the couplets were repeated in shadow on the wall behind – the shadow was one of those exhilarating strokes of luck.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simplyyour life outside of your work?

This is a dangerous game – I’ve played it before. A prairie kid who thought it would be good to live by the ocean, and before I knew it I was finding my way in Halifax. I should be – am – terrified, but I don’t think I’ve finished with it yet – want to live closer to ocean still.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I love to cook, love to read recipes, never follow recipes. I’d be a chef. But I’m no good in someone else’s kitchen, not an entrepreneur, would be irritated with customers and whoever hired me…

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I might have been a painter, but something invisible turned me away.

I read “Counterparts” by James Joyce in Grade 9 and understood something about my grandfather that had scared and puzzled me – it was electrifying to find that someone could articulate it.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Reading... in the midst of Pound’s Pisan Cantos, not very methodical about it, not trying to piece together every historical or political reference. The leaps thrill me – I landed at “forthwith” and have been suspended there since.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I wrote The Red Birdin an uninsulated room during a winter so cold that snow compressed on the roof, driving brown fetid water down my walls which froze on the window glass. Aaliyah died that winter, and Al Gore conceded. Several belts of whiskey per night could alleviate these and other problems. On the other hand, I wrote that book in a condition of extreme luxury: I was a grad student, and I have never had so much time to write since then. As a result, the book reflects a process-oriented approach to writing. Each afternoon I would flee to the bookstore and read the New York Times from front to last page, including the business pages etc. I would write down any odd idiom, caption, typo or term of art in my notebook. Then I would go to class and the bar. In the morning, while still in bed, I would return to my notebook, reread it with my eyes half closed, circle any quote that caught my attention without editing myself, and trying to perceive the way in which this randomized selection of quotes dialogued with each other. That’s how I wrote every poem in that book. It was a kind of chance-based and automatic writing, though I didn’t realize it then, since what came out at the other end of the process were lyrics. It was as Tristan Tzara describes cutups: “The poem will resemble you.”

I wrote The Commandrineunder a different kind of pressure. Rather than snow driving dirty ice water down my walls, I lived under a building (in a basement apartment, but since it had a door out the back it was called a ‘garden apartment’ in Chicago bird language). Roots had grown into the pipes driving air up through the toilets, causing large bursts like the soundtrack in Victory at Sea. Also I had almost no time to write, as I was adjuncting four comp classes at two schools and teaching poetry one day a week in a public school. When I sat down for my two hours of writing time per week on Saturday morning, very strange voices squeezed through my hands and onto the page. These were archaic voices I had collected over a lifetime of survey courses and anthology reading: Manfred, Faust, “I dreamed I saw the new moon/with the old moon in her arms/Well if the bard is weatherwise tonight” That kind of thing. All these voices crowded in and chatted with each other and that’s how I wrote the nautical verse play at the center of The Commandrine. It utilizes every convention of the form: sailors, the Devil, a damned genius/poet/head of state, etc. The other poems in the book are also filled with the kinds of strange locutions you find in anthologies: apostrophes, exclamations, epithets (especially), paens, etc.

Fletand Nylund I wrote in tandem out of a different kind of project. I essentially attempted to write a genre novel in each case. I made no attempt at originality in terms of the plot or characters. In fact, I treated these conventions as a kind of form, in the same way the conventions of a sonnet provide the material and rhetorical form. Then I went about fulfilling that form using something close to prose poetry. In each case the syntax had different requirements. In the case of Flet, the sci-fi dystopic, I wanted to create a heroine with no sense of a personal past, so it’s written in a kind of hallucinatory present tense. In the case of Nylund, a baroque noir, the past tense is so seductive that the hapless protagonist is so lost in his memory plot that he becomes unwittingly entangled in a present tense murder plot.

Right now I have at least three projects. I regularly write poems, with an emphasis on performance. I am working on a collection of stories. And I have a half finished novel, a historical romance (!) set in Occupied France (!!). It’s SMUTTY.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

My parents gave me this anthology when I was a gradeschooler, I think it was called ‘Best Loved American Poems’ or something like this. It was incredibly patriotic and therefore carefully segregated into regular poems (including chestnuts by Thoreau, James Whitcomb Riley, Longfellow, etc), folk songs and ballads, and, of course, ‘Negro Spirituals’, rendered in dialect. Needless to say I found this an incredibly surreal read, particularly because I would flip around at random and find neoclassical references next to a supposed representation of ‘Negro’ speech so freighted with apostrophes and contractions that it sputtered like a machine rather than any human voice. The book was like the most incredible collapse. The Index of First Lines, as you can imagine, was like a diatribe spoken by a madman from New England. The experience was not so much ‘weird old america’ as ‘demented, dangerous old america’ , because at the same time the apparatus of the book was so didacticly cheerful. I think this book has been incredibly influential on my sense of writing. I would describe my writing as ecstatic, exuberant, dismayed, inflated, crushed down, and devious.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing intitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

When I ever get a chance to write, my writing comes very quickly and then I revise as I go. I no longer keep notes for my creative work. I’m just too strapped for time. I revise it as I go so that the shape is always adjusting itself. Then I email myself the drafts and then I lose the emails among my 4000 emails. This is a very bad and undisciplined way to work. It ensures that I have no literary history, which I like.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

My work begins at the beginning for the reasons stated above. Each book of mine seems to have a different idiolect and set of syntactical rules. Once I screw around with the sound enough to figure this out, there’s a fractal kind of process that happens. The micro- syntactic shape begets the macro-formal shape of the whole story, or novel, or what have you. The first few lines tell me what kind of piece I’m working myself up to and for. But not right away.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I adore readings. Readings are where it’s at. I love thinking about the material aspects of the text and how they relate to the sonic aspects, and how those two aspects are incompatible and open up a really exciting interval that’s full of risk and potential. People always tell me after my readings that they had no idea I would read this way, with this much energy and funny voices, that I should be an actress, etc. At first that troubled me, I thought I should do more to make the poems look on the page the way they sound in performance. Then I realized that not only is this impossible, but this gap is a kind of wonderful and awesome thing, a space of potential. And I really dive into that space when I perform and pull the whole room into that bombastic, tickish space with me. When I write poems now, as opposed to the textual practice of my first book, I try to nudge my toe into that bombastic space and imagine the poem as this flimsy medium that opens onto this vertiginousness like the city scene in Blade Runner. I’m basically writing for performance. That means the texts themselves are hopefully odd things that jump up and fly around in performance.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’m extremely theoretically concerned! All I do is protest, to quote Bob Dylan. Ok, what interests me are Bataille and the Notion of Expenditure; Antonin Artaud; Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literatures; translation theories; and disability theory. I’m interested in a kind of obscene text and obscene body, in rhetorics of failure, including the failure of one medium to fit into another, like, say, the bad fit of performance to into the printed page, and the unlimited potential energy unleashed by such failures. I’m interested in the possibility of loser auteurs, like Jack Smith and Ray Johnson. I’m interested in new theories of reading, digestive theories that deal with consumption and thus are both gross and political. I’m also interested in pedagogical theory, the way academics try to ‘control’ the text in the classroom as a kind of magic charm through which they control the students and control language itself. For example, the ban on teaching translations as primary texts in English departments reflects an anxiety over mastery. If the teacher can’t read the text in the original, he or she can’t be a ‘master’ of the text, a ‘master’ of language, or a ‘master’ of the students. Instead I think it’s fruitful to let uncertainty and discomfort into the classroom and recognize them as points of possibility. I’m pretty excited about Yoko Ono right now—not (only) for her Fluxus, but for the way she totally rewrote John Lennon as a Fluxus artist (‘Imagine’ is pure Fluxus) and for unintentionally (?)involving the entire world in piece of total theatre about race and gender with herself as the dark and hated villainess through whose heart the villagers would very much like to drive a stake. This piece of theatre has been running now for 40 years and puts Wagner to shame. I even saw recent installations on VH1 last night. What a woman.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The role of the writer is to continually destroy everything and pull everyone down deep into the mess of things and then to stand up. I’m thinking of another hero of mine, Aimé Césaire, and the imagery towards the end of Notebook of the Return to My Native Land, which uses fecal imagery to describe slaves exploding from a slave ship. In Eshleman’s translation :

I say right on! The old negritudeprogressively cadavers itselfthe horizon breaks, recoils and expandand through the shredding of clouds the flashing of a signthe slave ship cracks everywhere… Its belly convulses andresounds… The ghastly tapeworm of its cargo gnaws thefetid guts of the strange suckling of the sea!And neither the joy of sails filled like a pocket stuffed withdoubloons, nor the tricks played on the dangerous stupidity ofthe frigates of order prevent it from hearing the threat of its in-testinal rumblings

[…]And the nigger scum is on its feet

The seated nigger scumunexpectedly standingstanding in the holdstanding in the cabinsstanding on the deckstanding in the windstanding under the sunstanding in the bloodstandingandfree

Or in the words of Amiri Baraka, “It’s nation time, get up santa claus”

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

If anyone’s interested in working with me on my writing, I’m happy. The editors that I’ve worked with at both journals and presses have been tremendous. Editing and publishing are/should be tremendous art projects and social acts.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“It’s nation time, get up santa claus”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

Well, as I said above, I think there’s failure or non-equivalence when you move between different media and I’m very interested by that. My novels scrupulously fulfill conventions of the genres in which they participate and are thus failures; they are not interested in originality formally, plotwise, characterwise. They are only interested in their runaway prose. I also have a hunch that texts have nodes where they participate in genre and others where they write away from genre.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

A typical day for me begins with getting my toddler out of bed. I deal with her body for about two hours, take her to daycare, and go to work. I come home, feed her, bathe her, sing to her, and go to sleep. An atypical day for me includes about two hours when I can do some writing in the morning. I typically write when I’m half awake. I’m myopic and a hearing impaired ( I wear hearing aids) so I have a very mediated and partial, disintegrating relationship with the world which helps my writing. My hearing aids only like to hear noises produced by machinery, and they also make all sound synthetic through microchips, so it’s like ‘Revolt of the Things’ around here.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word!) inspiration?

I turn to South Bend. Really, until you have lived in a rotting rust belt town you have not lived. People are hurting here, and they are dogged and ingenious. They drive their trucks through the walls of their living rooms on a nightly basis. They get in fights and throw pregnant dogs at each other. They find remarkable items to pawn (one winter morning two middle aged people were standing outside one of the many pawn shops at 7 AM trying to hold a window airconditioning unit up out of the snow. They were wearing sweatsuits and no coats.). There are residential motels here, one is called the Wooden Indian and it has almost no interior. So it’s a shelter without any shelter. We have a lot of yard sales around here where everyone tries to sell used goods to everyone else. The same used goods just pass back and forth. Capitalism is played out and distended here and very visibly broken. As a pregnant woman and a mother with a toddler, I fit right in to most expectations about women in this place, at least until I open my mouth and reveal myself not to be a Hoosier. But most of the time, at the supermarket, the BMV, the playground, the IRS office, daycare, I do not open my mouth. One is not invited to do so. As Denis Johnson writes at the end of Jesus’ Son, “I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

This question strikes me as obscene. What home are you referring to? Are you suggesting that my home has a ‘fragrance’? I love it.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Oh my God. Well, books come from everything. I still believe, despite everything (yes Anne Frank reference) that’s there’s something special about writing, that it can hold every other art form and form in the world, and that the things that it holds badly (like performance) it is excellently deficient in and produces something interesting out of the deficiency. Then again, when I was watching those Ryan Trecartin videos on YouTube, where he has those great lines, like “My personal really concise pussy is creating a very inner monologue that I’m not going to share with you as I become dynamic.” And I think, that line is so dazzling, but at the same time, it’s as if the art is degrading into language, language is the shit of the art. And then I think of the artshow in Bolaño’s Distant Star, the photographs of the young women’s corpses disintegrating into the air, and also of “She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic.” (Twin Peaks). So I love the degradation and decomposition and I’m not worried about it at all.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Graham Foust's fourth book, A Mouth in California, will be published by Flood Editions in the fall of 2009. He lives in Oakland, California.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

a) I went from being someone who hadn’t published a book to someone who had—it was rather anticlimactic, though I wasn’t really bracing myself for any significant change. It may have contributed to my acquiring a job at a university.

b) My newer work is, for lack of a better word, thicker. I’m using longer lines and less white space.c) It looks different, I think, but it feels about the same.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I began writing fiction in high school, and I was terrible at it. I had a teacher in college who was teacher enough to tell me the truth. She said I that wrote great sentences, though, and then she asked if I’d ever tried writing poems. I hadn’t, so I did.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

a) When I hear the word “project,” I reach for my pillow.b) Both.c) Copious notes.4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

For the answer to the first question, see lines 5 and 6 of John Berryman’s Dream Song 29. I don’t know the answer to the second question. I guess I tend not to think of books when I’m writing poems—once I get a bunch of poems that seem to go together, I assemble them into a book-like stack, at which point I show it to some people in order that they may verify or dispute my sense that the poems fit together in some way.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

It’s often helpful to say the poems in front of people and to hear their immediate reactions to them, so it’s part of the process in that sense. I tend to revise a lot when I read, and it’s usually an enjoyable experience for me.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

a) I don’t think someone without theoretical concerns would bother to write poems.b) None. I answer questions in prose.c) Allen Grossman: “A poem begins and ends in silence. Why not call it nothing?”

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I’m generally bored by writers who have “roles.” I think writers should let readers take care of that sort of thing.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

In my case, it’s very easy and absolutely essential.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

The best advice I’ve heard was to avoid a certain person who shall remain nameless. Unfortunately, the only reason I know that this was excellent advice is because I didn’t take it.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t have a writing routine. A typical day usually begins with my son requesting that I “play bears” with him.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I just do whatever else there is to be done. I don’t find the stalking of inspiration very pleasurable. The ability (and/or the desire) to write poems disappears now and again. As yet, it’s never not returned.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Depends on the home. Stale beer and lilacs and manure remind me of Wisconsin. Stale beer and asphalt and red onions remind me of Buffalo. Pills and soap remind me of Iowa. Coffee and eucalyptus and Kettle Chips remind me of Oakland.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I see what he means, of course, but I go outside every day and walk around without a book in my hands. And I look at paintings and listen to records and read science-related articles in general interest publications. I suspect I’d be foolish to say that these activities didn’t influence me. At the very least, they bored me enough to send me back to whatever book I was reading.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I haven’t seen a movie in three years and don’t remember what film I last saw. Now Amy is reminding me that I have in fact seen The Darjeeling Limited(which I hated) and Juno (which I thought was okay). I have been watching The Wire and I think it’s terrific.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

The response to my first book woke me up. It made me conscious of what I was doing or of how readers interpreted what I was doing. Until then I was underwater. Writing was intuitive and unconscious. I was very self-critical and aware of the words on the page and how I wanted each sentence to be, but beyond that – the marketplace, genres, readers, I had no clue. My last book was difficult to write. It has everything to do with genre. In it I tried my hand at historical fiction, oral story telling, second person narration, first person and third omniscient. The typical sophomore mistake: I tried to do too much, probably. But personally I like books that fail at what try to do because often these books have an innate restlessness about them, the author is taking chances, trying things that probably cannot be done or should not be tried at home, alone.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I came to song writing first. For years, I was writing deeply personal and revealing songs (on guitar) about my relationships with girlfriends I never had in the first place, songs that had absolutely nothing to do with me or how I really felt about said non-existent love interests. From music I learned about projecting a persona. I’ve never been satisfied with my poems. On the rare occasion I have been happy with them, readers and critics have not been.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing intitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I am more of a re-writer than a writer. It comes quickly at first, then not at all, then I delete or erase, and then I re-write changing little along the way. Then I turn it upside down, then inside out. Then I tear it up. Then I water it. I repeat this process for five years or so. No note taking. I’m too impatient for that.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Wardlife began with the idea of writing very short, accurate-to-transparent portraits of people. Each portrait was meant as a finger exercise or etude. Writing that book was my apprenticeship. I was learning my chops. I never look at the big picture. I get stuck in quicksand and shadows behind each word. All I try to do is finish the sentence I’m working on. What leads me on and gives the whole project some kind of arc or continuity is the sensibility of the piece as a whole. I have aesthetic goals, and structural criteria, which I stomach before I begin. The aesthetic vision drives me forward.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Playing live almost killed me when I was a musician. The alcohol and the anxiety-provoked fasting ruined me for days. But I’ve come a long way. I enjoy reading now. I used to really hate them. Mostly, I disliked the context of literary readings, the preciousness of these events, their artificiality, the emperor’s new cloths aspect of them. These days readings are okay, but author interviews are not my cup of tea. I’m a product of New Criticism. For me the author is dead. Why revive him or her?

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

The questions are usually aesthetic ones, and architectural. For example, in Eva’s Threepenny TheatreI tried to reconcile Brechtian alienation with an arc of emotional identification. To me that’s what the book is “about”. It is also about genre, which I believe is a current question. I have said I wrote Eva to provoke some ‘genre consciousnesses’. I mean this playfully. But sure, readers need to become aware of literature’s class structure or the caste system that sets fiction apart from non-fiction, and imagination versus opinion and the truth. The book is about the process of writing creative non-fiction. I call it fiction about family memoir. It’s really about the fiction of such a thing as non-fiction family memoir or creative non-fiction.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I went to see a reading by Aleksander Hemon, a writer I admire. He was asked the same question at BlueMet in Montreal years ago. He answered that the writer’s only obligation is to his or her sentences. I feel the same way. Now, he also echoed the humanist perspective that writing and reading potentially has transformative power, the power to make us more sensitive and self-aware as human beings. Reading is like exercise. It stretches us as human beings. I have the same old secular humanist beliefs.

As for the role of the writer or his/her place in our culture, I like what my friend the writer Liam Durcan recently told me: Andrew, he said, we’ve become harpsichord makers. Fine craftsmen, maybe. Beautiful instruments made, sometimes. But not too many people are in the market for a harpsichord these days. And a lot of buyers, when they place that harpsichord in the living room, never play it.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Well, “internally” - that is, in my head - I already work with about three editors or competing voices of chagrin. These editors are mostly a nuisance. They say awful things about me and about what I write and about why I write. But true external editors: I love them. I can’t stop writing without them. I never finish projects only abandon them. Editors help me do that. I can’t thank Kate Kennedy and Amanda Jernigan enough for all the work they did on Eva’s Threepenny Theatre.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Hold on to the boat.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

The more the merrier. Different genres and their respective limitations or ground rules let you be different people, or a different writer.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Over the years it has changed. Morning is best, or late at night. Right now a typical day begins with one hour of writing early. Then I walk my son or daughter to school, and then I take the dog out for a run. Then I return home and write or read until I think about playing squash. Then I play squash.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I’ve been working on a short story called What Happens To Us for about eight years. That story revolves around the crisp vision of a character I’ve called Alex Pratt. Alex Pratt is one part Christopher Pratt and one part Alex Colville.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Two projects. A novella called the Great Escape about Michael Paryla, an actor who appeared in the Hollywood movie alongside McQueen and Attenborough et al but never got a credit. He’s a relation of mine. Three years after appearing in the movie he died in Hamburg from an overdose. It’s going to be about acting and writing and escapism. The first parts will be non-fiction; the ending pure fantasy. Again I am working with family history material but trust me the process is not ancestor worship. Rather, I like the idea of taking on a traditional subject and treating it experimentally. I’m redefining Eliot’s essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Here I am going to sharpen my individual talent against my family tradition, not the literary one.The second project is a novel called The Song Does Remain The Same about a kid named Virgin Harry who pays a price for hating the band his girlfriend loves. Led Zeppelin.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book gave me a certain amount of confidence and gumption, though I think I still would have forged on with writing if it hadn’t been published. A Fork in the Roadwas so different from my later books – certainly more commercial in appeal – and by nature not as risky. At the time that I wrote it I was already working on postcard, what would become my third book, but an offer to write A Fork in the Road came my way first, so I put postcard aside and did it.

2 - How did you come to non-fiction first, as opposed to, say, fiction or poetry?

I actually came to poetry and fiction first, but it took longer to get my fiction published. My fiction can be risky at times, with respect to form, language and honesty – not light bestseller material – so it took a while to find a publisher willing to take that risk.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing intitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I think about things for a long time. I think about a lot of different things. And then, every once in a while, I sit down and try to see if there are connections between these things, if something in them fits together. I do make notes, but I try not to write from them, I try to see if they can just be the starting point (or continuation) of something. When the writing comes, it tends to do so in intense periods broken up by longer periods of reflection – usually about three months of writing, six months of re-thinking, then three months of writing, etc.

4 - Where does a fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I never know how long something is going to be until it’s finished. And even then I don’t know. My short story “postcard” started out feeling like a very long, conventional piece, and that’s originally how I wrote it. What I thought was the final draft was about 250 pages long. But when I was finished with it, I let it sit for six months or so without looking at it, and then took it to Banff to go over it again. About halfway through a month-long stay there, where both I and my advisor were struggling with it, I had a breakthrough. In one three-hour period, I slashed two-thirds of the story and gave the surviving third the “form” it now takes today, which felt much truer to me than the original, longer piece. I don’t want to ruin anything, but you have to see the physical layout of “postcard” to understand what a radical transformation it was...

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I do enjoy doing readings. I love meeting readers, and it gives me a chance to see my work in a new light. Pace in a piece is very important to me, and that only becomes apparent when read aloud, for some reason. By the time I’m doing readings, the pace has been worked out, but it’s always good to go back to something that’s completed to remind myself of the process, or mistakes, or accomplishments...

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Hmmm. You know, I think it just comes down to truth and honesty for me. Earlier, I was obsessed with why people didn’t tell the truth. Now I’m obsessed with the different kinds of truths that people hold, both between themselves and within themselves.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think the writer’s responsibility is to tell a truth. Not necessarily their own, or to be objective about it, but to be true enough to a subject or character that both the writer and the reader can gain from it. Otherwise there’s no point in sticking with a story, either as a reader or a writer.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Always essential. No difficult, but not always easy. If an editor is really having a problem with a section and Ifind myself overly-defending it, then I have to ask myself if my writing in that passage is good enough to convey what needs to be conveyed.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“A young writer’s best friend should be the garbage can.” The best teacher I ever had told me this more than 20 years ago, and it’s stayed with me (see question #4). I think he was trying to convey not that there’s no worth in a young writer’s work, but how long the process can be before you have something that feels right.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to critical/creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

It’s easy, though I often employ non-fiction in my fiction and embellish a bit in my non-fiction (who doesn’t?). It’s often hard for me to tell them apart, but I don’t mind as long as the essence is true. I wish we didn’t depend on the distinction so much. Someone once told me that the Spanish don’t differentiate between fiction and non-fiction, so when you walk into a bookstore in Spain you have to leave your North American prejudices behind. I don’t know if it’s true, but I hope it is.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I have no routine. I write when I feel I absolutely need to, when I feel that not writing would be a mistake. For me, reading other writing and absorbing things, observing, are just as much a part of writing as the actual writing part, so as long as I’m doing any of those things, I feel like I’m working, and that’s routine enough for me. Anything more regimented and I feel like I have to produce, which kills anything innovative and interesting.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Film. Other great writing. Sometimes I’ll read/re-read a book which has a style similar (but not too similar) to what I’m writing to get my head back into that voice again.

13 - Have you have a lucky charm?

A fountain pen with a flat nib and a lined notebook that feels nice – thick with paper, but not so thick that it’ll take years to fill. I still write longhand, then transpose to the computer, which seems ridiculous, but for me it makes for better, more careful/thoughtful writing.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Everything influences my work. Sorry, I don’t mean to be glib, but it does.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Be paid well for all of the time and effort I put into my writing. Not a lot of money, but enough to make it feel like the relationship is a bit more balanced.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’ve attempted (and held) many occupations to support myself while writing. My official occupation at the moment (in terms of income, anyway) is as a bookbinder and book restorer, which I like, but there’s not much mental work involved beyond some occasional problem-solving. I think I may have wound up as an unemployed filmmaker if I hadn’t been so obsessed with books my whole life. Or maybe a psychiatrist – one of the kinds who just listens.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

A force. I can’t describe it. I’ve known since I was in grade 6 that I needed to write, and it has been the one thing I’ve stuck to, for better or worse, since then. And I still love it like I did back then. I can’t say that about anything else I’ve ever done.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I’m working on a fiction piece about someone who coincidentally decides to abandon urban living for a rural/more self-sufficient setting (the foothills of the Canadian Rockies) on the day of the attacks in New York City. I’m trying to examine why we’re turning our backs on landscape... The piece uses embedded photographs to recapture a lost way of living, a lost feeling of space, a lost time, a comfortableness in nature.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Winner of the 2004 Pat Lowther Memorial Award for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman for Still (Black Moss Press), Betsy Struthershas published eight books of poetry and three novels as well as co-editing an anthology of essays about teaching poetry. She received the Silver Medal as runner-up for the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award in 1994 and was short-listed for the Arthur Ellis Best First Novel Award in 1993. A past president of the League of Canadian Poets, she has read her work from coast to coast in Canada, in Australia, and in North Carolina; her poems and fiction have been published in many anthologies (most recently, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetryand Going Top Shelf: An Anthology of Canadian Hockey Poetry) and literary journals; she has taught workshops in both poetry and fiction to students of all ages from kindergarten to adults. Resident in Peterborough since 1977, Struthers works as a freelance editor of academic texts.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Although I’d had poems published in literary magazines, I didn’t feel I could call myself a “real writer” until after the publication of my first book. I had the confidence then to join the League of Canadian Poets in order to meet other poets – living in a small town in central Ontario I felt very isolated from the larger writing community. First book publication also gave me the courage to keep writing and exploring the craft of poetry, the belief that I could do this work successfully. And made me anxious to create another book, to not be a one-book writer.

My most recent work is an extension of a form I’ve been experimenting with, a kind of prose poem/poetic short fiction – very short, very narrative, very poetic. My first book, Censored Letters, was a narrative sequence of poems told from the persona of a woman whose husband has gone to fight in the First World War, leaving her, like Penelope, to keep the home fires burning. This narrative streak has reappeared over and over in both my fiction and poetry, the telling of story.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I procrastinate, walk the dog, wash floors, walk the dog again – anything but sit down to work. Then a line will occur to me, seemingly out of the blue (often on those dog walks, the rhythm of movement translating into words) and a poem will spin itself out. I write in my head for a long time before committing to paper – well, to the screen. My handwriting is so illegible that from the beginning I typed my work to see the proper spacing of lines on the page. I don’t keep a journal or take notes, but first drafts go through many revisions – of line length and spacing as well as word choice – before I’m satisfied enough to show the poem to anyone else.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Poems begin with a line, fiction with an idea and a voice. I often write in long sequences or serial poems and these do tend to come quickly as the voice inhabits me until I feel they’re done – or it’s finished with me. But I don’t usually think of having a “writing project” per se. I write until I think I have enough poems for a book and then structure them into what feels like a logical order, often dividing them into cohesive sections. Sometimes these sections are “unfinished” – they need something more and that alone will call forth a new poem (usually) to fill the gap. But I don’t think too much about “the book” until I have a substantial number of new poems accumulated.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I always get nervous before a reading, have dreams of standing at a podium before a crowd and opening a book to blank pages … but once I do begin, I trust the work will speak and I react to the reactions of the audience. A poem always sounds different when read aloud to others – I often make changes, sometimes in mid-stride because I can hear something not working well. So it’s a love/hate kind of thing.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

In my day job as an editor of academic texts, I wade through too much theory. So I refuse to put theoretical brackets around my work. I hope it speaks for itself.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The role of the writer must be to articulate as best as s/he can the reality of living in this place at this time. Sometimes that means taking a public stance on a political issue affecting the arts – but that kind of rhetoric remains outside the art itself. The role of the writer is to translate the world as it is honestly and openly in the work.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Absolutely essential. It’s too easy for the eye and ear to relax when reading over one’s own work, too easy to assume that connections and/or images that are clear to you as the writer will be clear to the reader. I don’t always hear from those first readers of my work – fellow poets whose work I in turn critique – what I want to hear (that is, how brilliant every single word and line is!) but I take their criticisms and suggestions seriously. I may not agree with their suggested changes, but if they do suggest change – especially if, unknown to one another, more than one has a problem with a particular image or line -- then I know it’s not working, that I haven’t done my job yet and must go back to the work to make clear what it is that the poem is saying..

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Read. Then write.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I began to write fiction because (1) I had an idea for a novel that begins with finding a body in the river beside my house and the voice of the finder came into my head; (2) I had a writer’s block in the middle of trying to finish a third book of poetry and was very frustrated and reading too many murder mysteries as an escape from worrying about not-writing; (3) some of those mysteries were so clumsily written that I thought “I could do better than that” – and had heard so many people say that about the books they could have written but did not, I thought I should either try it or shut up about it; and (4) I had bought my first computer and found it so easy to let the writing just flow, not worrying about having to retype errors or worry over dialogue. I ended up writing a trilogy of novels very quickly, but then I got tired of the voice and the genre, and found poems crowding my head instead. It was fun writing the novels and much easier work – every day I could sit down and review/revise scenes written the day before and that would suggest where the plot should go next (I never created a plot scheme or outline before I started writing, just began at page 1 and kept going to the end; this meant a lot of revision in the second and third (and fourth and fifth) drafts but felt most natural) whereas poetry depends so much on the intense involvement of the moment… I tried writing another novel, not a mystery, but my heart wasn’t in it and it wasn’t very good. Nonetheless, I’m now writing a kind of narrative fiction, very short stories loosely linked. I don’t think of them as either fiction or poetry, I just write.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I pretend that I write every day … but truth is, the day job gets in the way as does real life (laundry, meetings, walking the dog). I’m a binge writer, days going by without anything and then a line will occur and then a poem and then another … could be why I tend to write in sequences or serials. When a poem does occur, I drop everything else and attend to it until it’s done, as too often I’ve thought out the “perfect” poem (in the middle of a cold winter’s night for instance) but not written anything down because I haven’t been in the right place or time for it – then when I do find the time to write it, it’s gone.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I read new poems by poets unfamiliar to me in literary magazines, in books, on line to see what is happening now. I reread favourites. I revisit the work of friends … reading sparks the writing.

13 - What do you really want?

Peace on earth.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are thereany other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I’m heavily influenced by nature, the weather, the sky, the shape of the land, how the body interprets its surroundings. I’ve written some poems on my travels and many more (most) at the cottage. There’s something about the solitary contemplation that comes with being wholly in the natural world that starts the words connecting in my head.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I’m very eclectic in what kind of writing effects me. I read a lot of history; in my day job I edit a lot of political science, sociology, and anthropology and these concerns creep into my work. I read contemporary literature -- fiction (both “literary” and “genre” fiction) and poetry (both Canadian and other English-language) voraciously. There are too many writers whose work I like to name here.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Travel to the Galapagos. Travel to the Arctic. Travel…

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Is this a trick question? A writer has to be a writer or will go quietly (or not s quietly) crazy. Before I began to write seriously in my late 20s, I worked in promotion and advertising – a kind of writing if not a particularly interesting or challenging kind. And then I work as an editor, which is working with words as well. I can’t imagine doing anything else happily.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I worked in many other jobs – advertising, promotion, bookstore clerk, library clerk – before I began editing, which I could do part-time. I felt driven to write, was not (am not) happy doing anything else.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?